Drawing sustained parallels between golf and other forms of art and architecture is something that far too few “critics” of golf course architecture have been willing to flesh out and work through, by drawing upon sources and theorists from beyond just the dreadfully insular cannon of golf architecture writing.
A recent thread on Golf Club Atlas entitled “The Death of Minimalism” is a perfect example of the inability of most “critics’ of golf architecture to actually consider golf courses not as a series of turfed mounds, humps, hallows, but as “aesthetic and cultural landscapes, with all that entails about their status as negotiated spaces mediating realms of territorial space, human cultural activity, and complex market relations transcending immediate regional boundaries,” to use Klein’s description. Unfortunately, as is common to the discussion board these days, the thread merely devolves into bickering, stock phrases, worn adages, and so it ultimately goes nowhere.
To explain how and why “minimalism”—or the second thread of “post-modern” architecture, as Klein cites it—came about when it did, became the leading style of the era, and then gradually morphed into something essentially indistinguishable from the thread of golf architecture that its practitioners purported their approach to be an antithesis to, at least originally, one would have to delve into art-theory, economic-theory, Jameson, Lacan, Baudrillard, and whichever other of these sorts of theories and theorists that you fancy. I, of course, already did so, in three parts, beginning here.
But that’s not what I’m specifically concerned with in this article. Rather, what I am interested in is exploring the challenge, and the widespread struggle at least so far, of the generation proceeding the veritable golden one of Coore and Crenshaw, Doak, Hanse, and Whitman to create works that not only differentiate themselves adequately from those of their predecessors, but that will stand the test of time, as the best of these aforementioned four undoubtedly will.
In short, what I’m worried about is that their golf courses are bound to appear dated, as heavy-handed timestamps of a certain movement, of a certain reaction, of a certain period of time, whose truculent tropes and belligerent tricks will become tiresome and from which we will therefore all move on fairly soon, in the same way that literature and the academy have largely done so from the decidedly post-modern works of Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, and even David Foster Wallace, among others, not fifty years since these then-still-young associate instructors announced themselves as the supposed antidotes to the Bellows and Cheevers and Updikes and Irvings and Mailors and Vidals of the talk-show appearing, Pulitzer and National Book Award winning mainstream scene of American letters.
When reading any of these works, particularly the short story collections of Barthelme, it’s hard, nay impossible, now not to consider them as anything but the tortured products of young, white, academic men, who spent their late-teens and early twenties deconstructing and debating in enclosed, air conditioned, and brightly lit graduate seminar rooms. This was also the environment in which they tried their fledgling works upon their classmates in creative writing programs, where, according to Foster Wallace, who was never afraid to hide his own failings and self doubts, one is thought not to be a writer as much as how to be a teacher of creative writing (“Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young”). Thus, their stories read, feel, and sound like long series of uniformly clean, superbly neat, perfectly grammatical, and always well-punctuated sentences typed, re-typed, and re-typed again by annoyingly book-smart, overly theory versed authors who hadn’t gone out and experienced America and Paris and Spain and the world of war and women and heartbreak and boozy nights that morphed into languid, bleary mornings, the way that Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Callaghan, Styron, Mailor, Richler, Pound and even Roth and Updike all had in their younger years.
In other words, explicitly postmodern literature is plagued by a laboratorial, manufactured, desiccated aesthetic and style, because Barth and co focused on form, experiment, and iconoclast rather than on character development, plot, and morals, because they had no life experience and therefore lacked the wounds, bruises and blood and tears to pour into their stories and books. As Martin Amis wrote, postmodernism didn’t last, didn’t spread beyond a certain closed readership—largely middle class and liberally educated—, because Barth and co forgot the heart that makes literature beat, that makes it last: namely, the people, both the characters themselves and their readers. After all, great books, those that last, are larger than merely the people who write them: they contain possibilities—thoughts, emotions, kinds of wisdom, kinds of folly – that emerge, unplanned and unforeseen, from the writing itself. And the author also has, at least to a certain extend, a duty to his reader.
Perhaps a more-known, albeit just as apt, parallel to draw would be to music, specifically to the era of punk and post-punk of the mid-70s to mid-80s. As I’ve written before, minimalism was, in effect, golf’s equivalent of punk, a short-lived but highly influential movement in which groups like the Sex Pistols, The Ramones, and The Clash sought to restore rock to its roots by stripping away the theatrics, gluttony, and histrionics that had dominated the mainstream, really, since the emergence of The Beatles’ and The Beach Boys’ in the 1960s. Led Zeppelin’s copious riffs and fantasy inspired lyrics, Pink Floyd’s self-indulgent experimentations, Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” production, as well as the whole off-shoot of “hippie culture”, were among the most prominent groups and artists that they were angered by and thus rebelled against. The spearheading punks, who were largely public school kids from middle and lower classes, were also inspired by the stagnant political and economic state of the United Kingdom, especially, at the time, which manifested itself in their bitter tone and militant political messaging. Short songs, fast tempos, distortion, jangly riffs, stripped down instrumentation, personal lyrics dealing with anger and trauma, and aggressive vocals define most of the punk rock produced in its early stage.
Although minimalism’s zeitgeist lasted much longer than punk’s, it was likewise fueled by a desire to return architecture to its roots, to restore the danger and non-conformity of the golden-age, and to strip away the esurience that defined the works of Tom Fazio, RTJ, and Jack Nicklaus, among others.
Yet, punk bands could only formulate songs in such a concise, restricted manner for so long; in other words, they could only write and record a few records before it got tedious and repetitive, before the flame exhausted itself and burnt out. Early punk was very much a one trick pony. Ultimately, spearheading punk failed to disrupt the status-quo by “using conventional music (fifties rock ’n’ roll, garage punk, mod) that actually predated dinosaur megabands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin,” in Simon Reynolds’ words.
Therefore, many of the spearheading punk groups, such as The Sex Pistols and Television and The Buzzcocks, recorded merely a couple albums and then broke up; otherwise, those that remained together, such as The Ramones and The Clash and Sioux and the Banshee, were forced transition themselves to, what would become known as, “post-punk”. In addition, former members of punk bands reformed new ones, most notably John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd. And a number of teenagers who came of age on punk also added their voices and sounds to it, most notably Ian Curtis and Joy Division, Mark E. Smith and The Fall, David Byrne and The Talking Heads, and Wave.
Still working within the general ethos of punk, post-punk musicians began expanding their sound and arrangements, adopting elements from dance and electronic music, and widening their lyrical scope to include a broader range of emotions and topics. As Reynolds writes, “post-punks wanted to make modern music” and “radical content demands radical form.”
However, in golf, the punk minimalists did manage to overthrow the “predated dinosaur”, those being architects like RTJ, Nicklaus, and Arnold Palmer. Because of this dominance, then, this rising generation of “post-punk” architects now finds itself in a catch-22: either they continue working within the exact over-arching framework of their predecessors, who have, more or less, adhered to the commonly decreed “right” way to build their golf courses according to the foundational writings on the practice; or, otherwise, they begin to try to move away from the looming shadow of their forefathers and, in turn, the gospelled foundations of the art, too.
By nature, youth likes to rebel, and so this next generation has, by similarly expanding their arrangements and widening their scopes in the form of over-shaping, over-sculpting, over-beautifying, and over-artificializing when it is not necessary. The cocktail of drones, social media, and the need to pander to the rise of the “social media influencer” is, I would suggest, as much to cite for the direction that golf’s “post-punks” have adopted so far.
Listening to the majority of post-punk music now, however, some forty years on, feels akin to reading a Donald Barthelme story, a David Foster Wallace novella, or a Robert Coover novel: timestamped, maudlin, and playing their cards a little too in-your-facedly. The thumping drum machines, the afro rhythms, the then-still-new synthesizers (which have improved greatly in quality since), and the deep vocal filters all combine to exclaim “1982”.
In this same way, I fear that we’ll soon look upon golf courses such as Sweetens Cove, Old Barnwell, Landman, Cabot Citrus Farms, and Tree Farm, who all play their architectural cards in-your-facedly, with their rumbled and hollowed and wavy green complexes, vertical lines, abrupt shaping, and bellicose kicker slopes, as being decidedly of “2020-24” in the same way that Roxy Music’s “Flesh and Blood” is of 1980, or Pere Ubu’s “Song of the Bailing Man” is of 1982. Once again, I quite like these records, but they lack that “timeless” feel of the greats, that of records such as Pet Sounds, Blood on the Tracks, Slanted and Enchanted, Is This It, The Bends, and Definitely Maybe, among others, which sound just as new, as fresh, as innovative today as they did upon release. Moreover, Joy Division’s debut album is another that I would cite among these esteemed works; and it is decidedly post-punk, albeit less reliant on synths and drum-machines than on a gloomily haunting atmospheric sound that mirrored the crumbling, dilapidated state of post-industrial Manchester in the 1970s. As such, then, I do allow that perhaps a truly great golf course could be built in this “post-punk” style of the zeitgeist, but we haven’t seen it yet (maybe Old Barnwell, which I haven’t played, is that great golf course, but its initial rankings tell me it is only quite good, not great).
Returning to the parallel between postmodern literature and golf architecture once again, postmodern literature turned its attention inwards, wanting the receiver to focus on the form, structure, and composition of the works and on the language used in it, rather than on the “external”, such as character development (and the message the reader can grasp from it), moral, and suspense or drama or comedy. Similarly, that is the intention, it seems, of golf’s “post-punks” whose courses, unlike the decidedly natural ones of their forefathers, are designed to draw the golfer’s eye towards its tricks and tropes. Rather than emphasize the surrounding beauty and integrate themselves into it, as Bandon Trails or Pacific Dunes or even Streamsong Black all do, they seek to stand out, as explicitly manufactured products. Like great books, which are vehicles towards larger concerns and truths, the best golf courses are those that, in the words of Dr. Mackenzie, are indistinguishable from nature, that emphasize the circumambient environment, not themselves, first and foremost. Put differently, they seek to turn our attentions outwards, not inwards.
As with post-punk’s musicians, the radical demand of following golf architecture’s golden generation requires radical forms; and that is how golf’s post-punks have responded so far by adopting tropes that harken back to Pete Dye, as well as to the more radical of the golden age architects, such as Max Behr and Walter Travis (just as the post-punk bands adopted from lesser known musicians of the 70s). Yet I worry that, by wanting to escape the potentially smothering shadow of Doak and co’s golden generation, their directions are slightly wayward: everything is slightly too big, too bold, too manufactured. It’s a fine line that must be toed, a fine balance that must be struck, and none of them have quite done so yet. As with most young artists, it will take a few golf courses for them to find their voices, to learn from their mistakes, to become confident in their own skins, but golf’s powers-that-be must provide them with the opportunities to do so. You learn far more from failure than you do from success, as Nick Saban likes to say. After all, it took Tom Doak nearly a decade of producing nothing of real note until he built Pacific Dunes, and so too for Coore and Crenshaw before Sand Hills and Hanse before Rustic Canyon. In the same way, it took David Foster Wallace more than a decade of writing stuff that nobody cares for anymore to finally churn out Infinite Jest, likewise for Don Dellilo to produce his best works in Libra and Underworld, after fifteen years of churning out now virtually unreadable post-modern experiments like White Noise, Mao 2, and The Names.
